What makes fiction fiction (and what makes the realist novel fiction) is not content but the oblique manner in which it makes propositions about the world.48 Unlike the pseudofactual mode, which asserts literal truth so as to lay claim to other sorts of truth (moral, emotional, and so on), it operates analogically or hypothetically. Hypothetically: the vivid world postulated by Chesney’s novella is taken as a comment on the world that we share. “Dear Reader!” writes Dickens at the end of Hard Times (1854), “It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not.”49 Analogically: the writer of fiction says, in essence, “This sort of thing is always happening,” “This book is like the world.” Readers are free to remain skeptical, but their skepticism will not be voiced as a denunciation of the literal truth of the story, nor even as a denunciation of the novel’s inability to make claims on reality because it is not factually true. One attacks, rather, the analysis the book makes of the world. So when Lamartine criticized Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), he wrote, quite simply, “The world is not like that.”50 Fiction whose propositional value you reject becomes a fairy tale—imaginings that may well be internally consistent and vivid, but whose analogical power, whose claim on reality, is nil.
Reality Before Realism, or, the Pseudofactual
Fiction, then, was subtly paradoxical, advancing propositions about the world—and about very specific parts of that world—via the destinies of invented characters. “[My book] won’t be imaginary facts, it will be what happens everywhere” (Balzac); “My method is to depict true things with invented characters” (Hugo): it is hard to see in such abundant reformulations the desire to get readers “to believe without reservation in the reality of the fictive worlds [writers] created,” or an attempt to “encourage a benumbed and credulous form of reading that accepts at face value the most banal tricks of the referential illusion.”51 Nineteenth-century writers pushed the paradox to the fore, as if trying to think it through; scholars of realism have largely ignored it. In good part this is due to the “straw man” attacks on realist naïveté I have mentioned: imagining that realism was an attempt at illusion is good for bolstering our sense of our own sophistication. Yet what is notable about realist novels, from another point of view, is precisely their “-ist”: they do not pretend to be literally true. If we are looking for hyperbolically literal claims to truth, the place to go is not the nineteenth century, but the eighteenth or before. It is there we find the model of art-as-illusion; it is there theorists approvingly repeat anecdotes like that of the Baltimore soldier, which far from being representative of realism—pace Barthes—was making a very belated apparition in Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare; and it is there writers assert time and again the literal truth of their works, works that typically take the form of documents—letters, memoirs, and other purportedly discovered manuscripts.
Examples of the pseudofactual posture will occur to anyone familiar with the canonical works of Defoe or Marivaux or Graffigny, Walpole or Mackenzie or Laclos. But beyond such general impressions, what do we really know about this strange phenomenon? In one sense, a good deal—though our knowledge has been shaped and limited by an inability to separate the history of the novel from the history of realism. Assertions of literal truth, many have long argued, are part and parcel of the novel’s turn toward reality, a turn that was accomplished in the nineteenth century. The English and French pseudofactual novel was “a peculiar phase of the theory of realism,” declared the title of the 1913 article by Arthur Jerrold Tieje that may be the first modern scholarly examination of the subject. Knowingly or not, most have followed Tieje’s lead, producing a narrative that (for France at least) goes like this. In the 1660s, readers began to reject the marvelous but improbable deeds associated with the long French romans héroïques; plots and settings that matched everyday experience became the rage. As a result, the deliberately remote historical settings of the romance were replaced by the historical novella, or nouvelle historique, which made use of more recent, documented history (Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves [1678] is the celebrated example). Numerous other novellas were said to be true stories, recently transpired; their geography was that of French cities, and characters started sporting French names. Subsequently, the faux memoir established itself as the form that bridged history and the novel; as it faltered in the mid-eighteenth century, the epistolary novel, better able to “write to the moment” as the ascendant reign of sensibilité demanded, came into its own and dominated production until into the nineteenth century, when interest in the workings of history finally displaced interest in the workings of the heart.52 (The English novel requires some alteration of the specifics of the narrative, but as we’ll see in a moment, the big picture doesn’t change much.) Hence, in his 1969 study Imitation and Illusion in the French Memoir Novel, Philip Stewart sees pseudofactual strategies as part of realism’s rise out of the ashes of improbable romance: “The technique of imitating reality … did not await [nineteenth-century realists]: it had been pieced together by a score of novelists good and bad in the first half of the eighteenth century.”53 In a synthesis of Stewart’s findings and those of others, Dorrit Cohn thus concludes, “Historians of the novel have shown that, as the [eighteenth] century advanced and readers learned to accept the norms of literary realism, novelists tended to drop claims to reality or factuality.”54 By the claiming the literal truthfulness of their texts, writers helped point literature away from the allegorical or the ideal and toward the real; once the ideal had been vanquished, the posture could be abandoned.
The fact that Cohn’s synthesis occurs in a work titled The Distinction of Fiction suggests, however, a slightly different way of understanding this evolution. Realism, after all, is not real but openly fictional. What may be needed, then, is to turn the “more and more real” narrative on its head. This is what Lennard Davis does in his 1983 book Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, which rewrites the history of the novel not as a tightening of the bond with reality but rather as the discovery of fictionality itself. For Davis, the modern novel does not develop by turning away from romance, as many have argued or assumed; rather, the novel becomes the novel by distancing itself from factual forms of discourse. The seventeenth century, he argues, witnessed the birth and expansion of an “undifferentiated matrix” where news reports and novels were essentially indistinguishable forms of discourse. Then, in the eighteenth century, “as the news/novel discourse began to subdivide, and as the culture began making clearer demands for factual or fictional narrative, the old claim that a work was true become harder to substantiate. As that happened, the possibility arose that a work could be purely fictional.”55 Whereas most critics had seen a formerly fanciful genre being slowly altered through the invention of new techniques of accurate imitation, Davis casts the process as something of the reverse: the novel starts as true, and then slowly evolves indices of its fictionality. As for when this occurs, Davis argues that the “shift toward the fictional” is detectible in Defoe; the shift has not yet fully occurred in Davis’s two other major figures, Richardson and Fielding, but the implication is that once fiction has been explored by writers of this caliber, others will consolidate the gains.
Davis’s account was quickly followed by Barbara Foley’s Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (1986), which provides, at least on the face of things, a different version of the transformation. By allotting separate chapters to the pseudofactual eighteenth century and the realist nineteenth, Foley builds into the structure of her book an opposition. Indeed, Foley repeatedly stresses a qualitative break between pseudofactuality